The release of SM 2.38 made my Addon Manager styling start to look a bit ragged. Never done much in there and pretty much relied on my 'ripple effect' * to theme it.

But with that release, which included some bizarre code from Firefox, I figured it was time to theme it properly and, of course, the same for Thunderbird as well. So, that's what I was doing for a few hours today.

* the ripple effect is where you put just one background gradient on loads and loads of general bits, like richlistbox, etc. knowing that the effect will ripple through the entire theme and style many, many areas. Get it right and the gradient effects all play off each other. A very quick way to style a lot without doing much.

Then again, get it wrong and you get unwanted, unexpected effects popping up everywhere, which is why most themers avoid this technique.

Metal Lion latest SeaMonkey & Thunderbird Themes - Sea Monkey and Silver Sea Monkey"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)

For my own amusement and for those that may need them, these Complete Themes are now also additionally available in the form of an extension (xpi)

In addition, as I am now not hampered by the limitations of Mozilla's chrome manifest system *, there is now just one single extension to install that contains both the theme and the scrollbars. As you may imagine, the appearance and functioning of this alternative extension is identical in every respect to the usual versions above.

Contact me through the usual channels if you would like to try them.

I would stress that none of the above affects the usual users of these themes in any way and that they need do nothing.

Frank

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/C ... gistration ...in both theme and extensions there is a chrome.manifest file. Bizarrely in the .jar (theme) version you are not allowed to use the 'override' command, even though that is precisely what a conventional Complete Theme is doing, i.e. overriding the default theme.

However, you really do need to be able to use override to theme the webpage scrollbars. Therefore, to get around that with my theme template that does not replace the default theme, I simply coded up a 5kb extension that is 'allowed' to use override' and so does theme the content scrollbars.

So, now you know why my stuff is always a 'bundle' package of a theme.jar and a companion scrollbars extension xpi.

Metal Lion latest SeaMonkey & Thunderbird Themes - Sea Monkey and Silver Sea Monkey"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)

Err, no. Signing applies to Firefox only, not to SeaMonkey and Thunderbird.

I swear if they invented any more hoops for us guys to go through, we'd be permanently stuck in mid-air! The 'sub-package' there is the silver scrollbars.xpi and I explained in the previous post why that is needlessly needed.

You watch, I'll get this quickly signed and then on uploading get a 'Whoa!! Your add-on failed validation with 1 error. Sub-package must not be signed for SeaMonkey and Thunderbird Applications' message.

Later.....

Metal Lion latest SeaMonkey & Thunderbird Themes - Sea Monkey and Silver Sea Monkey"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)

NOTE - Due to a technical bug on the AMO website, the Metal Lion Silver Sea Monkey update has had to go out without its usual scrollbars extension. Existing users will not be affected, but new users will. Just as soon as AMO rectify this situation, a new complete update will be issued.

Edit - of course, immediately after doing the updates I spot that SM is picking up Firefox's habit of doing huge buttons in the Addons Manager - they put a min-height on the buttons and I then come along and use unset on them to get them back to normal. That fix will appear in the next update of these. No idea why they do that, trying to fill up the space maybe? Either way, it looks awful.

An innocent looking changelog that does not really give the full picture. Changes that happened in Thunderbird 45, especially the Linux version, made doing these updates a right bugger. Still, all fixed now.

Note to T/bird devs - brighttext should only apply to Personas, not 3rd party Complete Themes, even Firefox gets that right. Also, on the Linux version, when you decide to use tiny monochrome default toolbar buttons then how about taking more care how you code that so that it doesn't impact everything else?

Thanks Frank, got them last night, lovin' the Silver, as usual, meticulous detail, your Titlebar Toggle Button still works fine too. @ I assume the Themes are still compatible with Sea Fox ? Haven't seen Patrick around in a while.

Thanks, these aren't the most exciting themes I've ever done, compared to ML BMV, ML 300, etc. but they are exactly what I intended them to be and what, I felt, the existing SM theme range was lacking somewhat - crisp, tight, professional looking themes for the workplace. Must say, I don't find them too bad looking outside work either, but they are pretty restrained... by my standards.

I could convert some of my old ones to SM and T/bird, but looking at the usage figures of everyone theming these platforms, I reckon this whole theme ship has sailed. So be it.

mightyglydd wrote:@ I assume the Themes are still compatible with Sea Fox ? Haven't seen Patrick around in a while.

Very much so and if they weren't then I'd be straight onto Pat. Why far more SM users aren't using SeaFox is totally beyond me.

SM is a great browser and I've grown to really like the Email side as well, but if SeaFox didn't exist I'm afraid that I just wouldn't use it. So, yeah, I'm quite a big fan of it.

Metal Lion latest SeaMonkey & Thunderbird Themes - Sea Monkey and Silver Sea Monkey"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)

Thanks, Mighty. The position appears to even have improved since you wrote that.

One thing I have learnt is that if you write themes specifically with the workplace in mind, then don't be surprised if many of of your users do use them exactly like that. This means that I 'lose' well over a third of my userbase during the weekend, so the weekday figures are a fair bit higher than you see. What you see is the week averaged out. Either way, I'm not complaining.

Here's a very obscure fix if you are using ML SM AND the Custom Buttons extension AND using non default 'Stars' for the icons with that extension. With me so far?

Pop this in userChrome and it stops that strange twitch on hoverover (that was driving me up the wall) -